Why your business is at the mercy of Rightmove (and how to fix it)

Every month, an invoice lands from Rightmove. You pay it. Not because you have checked it is still fair value. Because not paying it means disappearing from where most buyers still start.

That is the whole problem. Rightmove does not have to compete for your business. It has to be tolerated.

That tolerated status has a price. According to analysis reported by Property Industry Eye, the average Rightmove fee moved from £1,314 a month in 2022 to £1,431 in 2023, up 8.9%. Then to £1,524 in 2024, up 6.5%. UK house prices rose 1.3% that same year. The fee grew five times faster than the market it depends on.

Research by Property DriveBuy, cited in the same report, puts Rightmove fees at up to 13.5% of an agent's commission income. Not marketing spend. Commission income. Before staff, before overheads, before profit.

The pattern has not broken in 2026. Shaun Adams, owner of Cooper Adams, told Estate Agent Today his fees rose more than 12% this year, on top of roughly 20% the year before. His description of the relationship: "Rightmove operates as a virtual monopoly. That expectation gives you a level of market power that fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship." He also pointed out that comparable digital advertising platforms, in genuinely competitive markets, cost "a fraction of the price," in some cases around a tenth.

That is not a portal fee. That is a monopoly tax, and independents are the ones paying it.

Most agents treat Rightmove and Zoopla fees the way they treat business rates: a fixed cost you grumble about once a year and then absorb. That is the wrong frame.

A cost problem gets fixed by negotiating harder or spending less. A structure problem does not respond to either, because it is designed so you have no leverage. What you are actually buying is temporary rental of visibility on infrastructure you do not own and cannot influence. It can be repriced at any point, with no consultation.

You have no seat at the table. You have a card machine.

Compare that to channels where you have more control: Meta ads, Google ads, local SEO, referral, content, email. Every pound you spend there builds something that belongs to you. An audience. A ranking. A database. Ad accounts with your own targeting and your own creative, focused on building your own brand awareness and lead pipeline.

Cancel a portal subscription and your visibility disappears the same day. Cancel a Google Ads campaign and your rankings, your reviews and your remarketing lists are all still yours the next morning.

Owned channels compound on their own. Paid channels do not work that way, but they are not a portal either. With Meta and Google you set the budget, the targeting and the message, and you can turn it off without a repricing letter landing in your inbox. Most UK agents avoid paid social and search ads because they expect the same portal-style relationship from any platform that takes their money. That is the wrong read. Paid ads are the one channel here where you hold full pricing power from day one.

The invoice is visible. The dependency is not. It is the more expensive of the two.

If Rightmove announced a 30% fee increase tomorrow, could your agency absorb it or walk away? Most independents could do neither, because portal traffic is not a channel for them, it is the whole pipeline. That is the position Rightmove prices you from. Every fee rise since 2022 confirms they know it.

This is not a call to leave the portals. Buyers still start there, and being absent costs real money. It is about making the portals one channel among several, not the entire pipeline that you depend on.

The same logic applies inside your own marketing, not just against the portals. Do not run on a single channel there either. Build at least three genuinely different paths, for example local SEO, Meta ads and email to your own database. If Google changes its PPC algorithm tomorrow and your cost per lead doubles overnight, an agency running Meta ads and email alongside it barely feels it. Whilst an agency running Google Ads alone has a real problem.

The goal is not to quit Rightmove. It is to make Rightmove optional, not existential. Five steps, roughly in order.

Step 1: Measure your actual dependency. Pull your last 50 instructions and work out what share came from portal enquiries versus everything else: direct, referral, social, search, content. If you are not already tracking this properly, our piece on multi-touch attribution for estate agents covers the exact setup. Most agents guess, and guessing understates the dependency, because portal leads are the ones you notice.

Step 2: Build one owned channel and one paid channel properly, before spreading thin. Local search is the obvious starting point, because the intent is already there. Someone searching "estate agent in your town" is closer to instructing than someone scrolling a portal listing. We cover the specific system in our local SEO piece.

Run a properly targeted Google or Meta campaign alongside it, aimed at homeowners in your actual patch, not a generic radius. It gets you volume while the organic side builds. Most agents have tried one badly run version of this and written off the whole channel. That is a targeting problem, not a reason to avoid it.

Step 3: Turn past clients into a referral engine. Referral instructions cost nothing per lead and arrive pre-qualified. Most agencies have no formal system for asking, they hope. A basic post-completion request process, reviews plus a direct ask, converts a one-off transaction into a recurring source.

Step 4: Renegotiate from a position of strength. Once portal enquiries are 40% of your pipeline instead of 90%, you have a genuine choice at renewal. Agencies with alternatives get better outcomes in every negotiation, portals included.

Step 5: Run it as one growth engine, not four disconnected tools. Local SEO, paid social, paid search and referral should work in unison, collectively pointed at a single goal, each with a slightly different role to play. Think of it as an orchestra: every instrument sounds different and plays a different part, but the point is the sound they produce together, not any one instrument on its own. Run these four as separate accounts with no shared plan and you get four instruments playing without listening to each other. Run them as one system and the same reviews that lift your map pack ranking also lift your ad performance, and the same audience insight sharpens every campaign that follows.

That is what a D2G growth engine is for: getting those channels playing towards one goal, building your own brand awareness and leads while your reliance on the portals comes down. Email to your own database can sit alongside it, run by whoever already owns that for you.

None of this makes Rightmove or Zoopla go away, and it should not. They still put your listings in front of active buyers at scale, and for now that reach is real. The point is narrower: right now, most independents have zero pricing power because they have zero alternative. Building controlled channels alongside the portals, some owned and compounding, some paid and switched on when you need volume, is how you get some of that power back.

Property Industry Eye (Rightmove fee data 2022 to 2024, Property DriveBuy commission-share research); Estate Agent Today (Shaun Adams, Cooper Adams, 2026 fee increase reporting).